The present invention relates to risk-based plant-maintenance apparatus and method for maintaining plant equipment such as steam turbines for thermal power plants, against damage, efficiency decay and shutdown.
Increase in the number of plants such as thermal power plants operating for long years has demanded maintenance at low cost but with no failures. Risk-based maintenance (RBM) has been recently introduced as one of the solutions to match the demands.
A known RBM is to decide maintenance priority allocations based ranking in the order of combinations of classified plant-equipment failure rates and consequence of failure, such as, disclosed by Kihara et el., in Piping Technology, pages 76 to 79, issued in December, 2000.
Classification of consequence of failure, however, requires experimental qualitative decision making, and hence has several drawbacks, for example, it does not necessarily involve quantitative evaluation.
In addition, no one has proposed so far is an assessment technique, the combination of risk-based assessment and life, efficiency and operational-function diagnosis already employed in plant management.